Will the next election ‘dossier’ consist of AI-generated videos?
Artificial intelligence is now reaching a point where broadly accessible tools allow the synthetic creation of highly realistic materials—images, audio, and, increasingly, video sequences entirely generated by AI.
As the industry leaps forward and the human eye strains to tell real from artificial, some experts and entrepreneurs have scrambled to think up solutions.
The digital space is about to become increasingly treacherous, suggested several experts consulted by The Epoch Times.
High-quality fabrications are already quick and easy to produce. Verification services have emerged, using AI to spot AI. The logical progression, however, will be an arms race between AI generators and AI detectors, leading to increasingly sophisticated fakes.
The result will be a virtual reality in which users largely lose the ability to discern the genuine and the fake from looking at the content itself. Increasingly, they’d need to rely on third-party verification services or sources of information that have developed a solid record of authenticity.
The issue is likely to attract the spotlight in the upcoming election season amid heightening concerns over the authenticity of political information.
Power of Video
Generative AI improved in leaps and bounds last year, going from surprisingly adept to eerily realistic.
“We saw from the beginning of 2023 to the end of 2023, images kind of pass the eye test,” said Anatoly Kvitnitsky, founder and chief executive of artificial intelligence detection service AI or Not.
“Our prediction is, video is going to have a similar moment in 2024.”
Realistic AI video is “definitely within our reach,” said Robert Marks, a computer science professor at Baylor University who has significantly contributed to the field of machine learning.
“In the future, you can do it from scratch, and it will be really realistic,” he told The Epoch Times.
Some of the experts pointed out that fake information, political or otherwise, isn’t a new phenomenon, and it has long been possible to fabricate imagery.
“Fake stuff has been around for a long, long time. … It’s just now that we have an automatic way of generating it,” Mr. Marks said.
By Petr Svab
